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The Sophists

The professional teachers providing instruction and guidance fir success in practical affairs

They specialized in using the tools of philosophy and Rhetoric for the purpose of teaching arete

(excellence, or virtue)

Rhetoric is the art and study of the use of language with persuasive effect

The sophists shifted the concerns of philosophy to the study of human cognition

The real world is quite different from the phenomenal world

The Sophists took for the standard the opinions of the individual

Absolute knowledge is impossible

All understanding is subjective

Truth is no more than opinion

Any opinion can be judged only by its practical utility

Protagoras

"Man is the measure of all things, of those which are that they are and of those which are not that they are

not."

For man the world is what it appear to him to be, not something else

There are 2 criteria for truth

The opinion of the individual

The practical utility of knowledgeKnowledge is subjective

Moral judgments are relative

Everything is true

The true aim of human thought is to serve human needs

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Socratesa classical Greek philosopher one of the founders of Western philosophy

The Apology ("defense-speech)

It is Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial

Socrates wrote nothing because he felt that knowledge was a living, interactive thing

Xenophon, Plato and others wrote Socratic dialogues portraying his teaching in literary form

Socrates was the first philosopher to shift the focus away from the natural world to human values

Socrates was interested in the practical use of reason

Socrates tried to find the basis for stable and certain knowledge

The way to attain reliable knowledge is based on the practice ofconversation

Dialectic method of inquiry or the Socratic method

It is a negative method of truth-seeking, in that truth is found by steadily identifying and eliminating that

which is not true

Socrates' method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning people on the positions they asserted and

working them through questions into a contradiction, thus proving to them that their original assertion was

wrong

Socrates himself never takes a position

This method of questioning is elenchus or "cross-examination"

The Socratic elenchus gave rise to dialecticIt is the idea that truth needs to be pursued by modifying one's position through questioning and conflict

with opposing ideas

It was designed to force one to examine one's own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs

Socrates showed the value of self-knowledge

The highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others

The instrument of clear thought is a definition

Only true knowledge is knowledge of concepts

What it is that makes men say that a certain thing or action is good or beautiful?

What people are looking at when they make such statements?

It is the Eidos, or the Idea

that a person has before him when he calls something "good or beautiful.There is something into things that never varied and never passed away

It is Idea of something (EIDOS)

Socrates did not separate Ideas from things

By the process of definition the mind can distinguish between two objects of thought

The particular The general (the Idea of something)Socrates distinguished two levels of knowledge

One is based upon the inspection of facts The other is based on interpretation of factsTeleology is a view that things have a function or purpose

Plato regarded Socrates as the father ofethics or moral philosophy,and hence philosophy in general

Knowledge is virtue

The best life comes from taking the best care to make oneself as good as possible, and the happiest people

are those who are most conscious they are getting better

All of the virtues must be cultivated together

human wisdom begins with the recognition of one's own ignorance the unexamined life is not worth living ethical virtue is the only thing that matters a good person can never be harmed, because whatever misfortune he may suffer, his virtue willremain intact

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Plato

In about 387 Plato founded the Academy as an institute for the systematic pursuit of philosophical and

scientific teaching and research

Philosophical education consists of intellectual activity including mathematics astronomy geometry music

The 1st

group of dialogues (Socratic dialogues) includes the problems ofEthics

The 2nd

group of dialogues includes the theory of knowledge

Plato brought together all the major concerns of human thought into a whole and clear organization of

knowledge

Myth of the cave in the 7th

book of Politeia: He who sees with his eyes is blind

Reality is unavailable to those who use their senses

What is the really real? What is knowable and what is real? What is the nature of ultimate reality and how

we come to know it?

Plato tried to discover the ultimate constituents of reality and the grounds for our knowledge of them

Sensescant be trusted. What we experience through senses is illusion

The real things if they exist must be: unchangeable, not be accessible to the senses

The really existing things of the world are not of this world but of someplace else

There are 2 worlds: the intelligible world of Ideas and the visible world of things

The world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only an image or copy of the real worldA world of Ideas (a world beyond that of the senses) All of the things that men perceive with their senses

appear to be but very imperfect copies of the eternal Ideas

The Forms are eternal, unchangeable patterns, of which the particular objects of sense are imperfect copies

Forms are related to particulars in that a particular is regarded as a copy of its form

A particular apple is a copy of the form ofApplehood. The apple's redness is an instance of the form ofRedness

Participation is another relationship between forms and particulars

Platonic Epistemology

Men, in construing a system of knowledge, constantly prefer what is more perfect to what is less perfect

Four states of mind

Imagining is the sense experience of appearances wherein these appearances are taken as true realityBeliefis induced by the seeing of actual object

Imagining and Belief are only opinions

Thinking represents the power of mind to abstract from the visible world

When a person moves from believing to thinking, he moves from the visible world to the intelligible world,

from the realm of opinion to the realm of knowledge

Knowledge is the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another

The knowledge must be present in an eternal, non-experiential form

The Platonic doctrine of recollection or anamnesis

Souls are born with the concepts of the Forms

The soul once lived in "Reality It once knew everything, but forgot it

Knowledge is acquired by Recollection/ The goal of Recollection is to get back to true knowledgeKnowledge is innate.

It is a matter of recollection, but not of learning, observation, or study

"Plato believed that ideas were far more real than the natural world.

He advised the astronomers not to waste their time observing the stars and planets. It was better, he believed,

just to think about them (Carl Sagan)